Writing about the food, farmers, fishermen, and folk of Long Island's North Fork.

Music

10/21/2017

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTOTom Hashagen is never far from a stringed instrument, or a kitchen.

In 1979 an itinerant guitar-playing chef named Tom Hashagen decided to quit his rambling ways, move to Shelter Island, and stay for good.

He’s brought a lot of joy to the life on the Island since then, cooking, making music, teaching and producing musical events. He’s done all this with the aid of some very specific tools: a mandolin, an ear for musical talent, and a certain way with turkey chili.

Tom, along with his wife, Lisa Shaw, will soon spread some joy on the other side of the moat, presenting mandolinist Mike Marshall and violinist Darol Anger in a performance at the Bay Street Theater on Friday, October 13 at 8 p.m.

More joy arrives on October 21, when Tom creates the white chili, laced with turkey (and some blend of spices known only to him), that has fueled the Shelter Island 5K post-race party for all 18 years of its existence.

The race, which benefits, among other things, patient care for women living with breast cancer, is also known by some zealots as “the run for the chili.”

Tom grew up in Glen Rock, New Jersey in a family with four brothers and sisters. His dad commuted to the city to work for a printing company, and his mom worked near home for an insurance company. He went to Paul Smith’s College in the Adirondacks and graduated in 1970 with a degree in hotel administration.

He spent most of the next decade traveling with a chef’s crew — a roving team of restaurant workers led by a head chef, who moved from one hotel to another with the seasons. The first year the crew worked at the Clearwater Beach Hotel, a classic grand hotel in Tampa Bay, then on to Cape Cod in the summertime, and to the Allegheny mountains of Pennsylvania.

Over the years he moved up, going from a relief cook who filled in for guys on their days off, to sous chef at the Chatham Bars Inn in Massachusetts.

One day, seemingly out of the blue, while working in Florida, Tom received a letter from James Eklund, the manager of the Shelter Island Yacht Club, inviting him to consider a job as their new chef. Tom’s father had seen the club’s ad in the New York Times, and took it upon himself to send his son’s resume. Tom found out about his dad’s intervention when he got the job.

He rolled off the North Ferry for the first time on May 5, 1979, drove directly to the Yacht Club, and spent six years there.

The decision to leave Florida for Shelter Island was easy. “I was tired of traveling,” he said. “I knew that I wanted to settle down and have a family, that part of my life was missing.”

As he got to know the Island, he realized it was the place for him. “I loved the good food out here and fishing and the isolation of it,” he said. “These are down to earth, hardworking people and I’ve never been afraid of hard work, so I got along.”

He made his living as a chef in the season, and carpentering in the off-season. He also did a stint with the North Ferry Company in the winter of 1981, removing rust from the bottom of a ferryboat at the shipyard.

That job required him to go down into the vessel with a ball-peen hammer in temperatures as low as 15 degrees and remove layers of rust that had been painted over repeatedly. He worked alongside a man who would be convicted (later overturned) of murdering his neighbor with a shotgun —the only official homicide in Shelter Island history.

“He was a little strange,” Tom said, “and yes, he also had a ball-peen hammer.”

Tom had played guitar since the 1960s and picked up the mandolin in 1980 when he began playing in a band on the Island with Paul Shepherd and Penny and John Kerr. One day Penny arrived with a friend named Lisa, and announced “This girl is now in the band.” Tom, who was not enthusiastic about the prospect of Lisa joining the band, let her and everyone else know what he thought.

In spite of the extremely poor first impression they made on each other, Tom made a pass at her soon thereafter at a Valentine’s event at the Legion known as the Cherrypickers Ball, and was delighted to get a positive response.

Their first child, Sara, was born in their home on Marc Street about a year later. Lisa was attended by a barefoot midwife who Tom drove from her place in Baldwin to the Island while Lisa had contractions in the back seat. It was close. Tom and Lisa’s son, Adam, was also born at home, in September of 1983, 17 months after Sara.

As their family grew, Tom and Lisa realized the house they were renting was for sale. Tom remembered a customer and guest he knew from the Yacht Club and Country Club who had told him if he ever needed anything he should ask her. Their benefactor agreed to lend them money for a down payment on the house, they closed in 1983 and started working on it, “eventually changing every wall,” he said.

Sara lives in Winnipeg, with her husband and three children; Lucy, 6, Sam, 4, and Max, 7 months. Adam is engaged to be married next September at Sylvester Manor.

Tom worked as chef at the Gardiner’s Bay Country Club from 1986 to 1989, and then he and Lisa attempted to run their own restaurant for a year and failed. Knowing he needed to start thinking about retirement and benefits, Tom took a job in adult education at BOCES, drawing on his extensive hotel and restaurant experience.

Eventually he went back to school for the certificate he needed to teach 11th and 12th graders about the challenges of the culinary arts, and the joys, “of watching someone eat something very good, that you prepared.”

Starting in 1994 Tom produced a series of concerts in the Shelter Island School auditorium often featuring performers who were about to be very well known, such as Nickel Creek with soon-to-be-stars Chris Thile and Sara Watkins, and Tim and Mollie O’Brien.

The concerts were sponsored by the town at first, and later by the Shelter Island Historical Society. In 2009, Sylvester Manor Farm became the sponsor, and Tom became musical events coordinator for the farm.

Tom is also an active volunteer for the Lions Club, serves on the board of the Shelter Island Library, and is an active member of Grace Presbyterian Church in Water Mill.

He said there have been times in his life when he has struggled with drinking and drugs. “I’m just thankful that when I let go of God, he did not let go of me,” Tom said. “I have a weak faith and a strong God.”

He’s grateful for the joy he’s been able to make. “I think I was blessed with a really good set of taste buds and ear buds,” he said. “I have a common taste, which means that if it tastes good to me, other people like it too. When I hear what I think is good music, then a lot of other people will too.”

Lightning round

What do you always have with you? A flatpick.

Favorite place on Shelter Island? Montclair Colony, the old neighborhood there.

Favorite place not on Shelter Island? Barbados

Last time you were elated? When Sara’s third kid, Max was born.

What exasperates you? Overregulation.

Favorite movie? Raiders of the Lost Ark

Favorite food? Pastrami

Favorite person, living or dead, who is not a member of the family? Tim Keller, who was head of Redeemer Presbyterian Church.

01/22/2017

ANNETTE HINKLE PHOTO The Lonely Heartstring Band in performance Saturday night at the Shelter Island School auditorium.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on January 19, 2017

An inch of icy snow coated Shelter Island Saturday night, but it would have taken a blizzard to keep Islanders away from the annual January bluegrass concert, an event that never fails to blow away the bleak.

A capacity crowd removed their outerwear, pulled off their mittens and put their hands together as The Lonely Heartstring Band kicked off Sylvester Manor Educational Farm’s 2017 Concert Series at the Shelter Island School auditorium.

Tom Hashagen was the host of the evening, and his group, Tom and Lisa and Friends included vocalist Lisa Shaw on keyboard, Steven Uh on fiddle, Henry Goode Jr. on bass guitar and Scott Hewett on drums. They dived into the song “Hungry Man,” made popular by Louis Jordan in 1949, and set the tone for an evening in which eating was a recurring theme.

The Lonely Heartstring Band’s lead singer and guitarist, George Clements wooed the crowd by introducing “Deep Waters” from the band’s new album, saying, “We’ve played a few islands, this one is an Island unto itself.” The song, with lovely lilting harmonies and fiddler Patrick M’Gonigle’s sonorous yearning passages was like bluegrass songs of the humpback whale.

The band played great bluegrass arrangements of pop music, especially on the Paul Simon song “Graceland,” where bassist Charles Clements showed his artistry. In the second set, the band rocked the J.D. Crowe song, “Born to Be With You” with nary an untapped-toe in the house.

Near the end of the band’s first set, a possible source for the soaring tenor, Mr. Clements vocal stamina was sourced as he expressed enthusiasm for the ginger orange cupcakes on sale in the lobby. He had already eaten one before intermission.

The band mainly skipped the hard-drinking, train-riding, prison-abiding genre of bluegrass in favor of fresh takes. George Clements and Patrick M’Gonigle wrote most of the bands distinctive songs, in which the tides do more rolling than the trains, whales mourn instead of doves, and songbirds sing out against the environmental toll of mining fossil fuel — themes not always associated with traditional bluegrass.

Matt Witler on mandolin and Gabe Hirshfeld on banjo rounded out the band with skill, heart and extremely fast fingers. In Mr. Hirshfeld’s charming introduction to his song, “Big Bruce” he revealed that he named this lovely fiddle tune for a French bulldog he met in a bar, a break with the bluegrass tradition of naming songs after coonhounds.

Mr. M’Gonigle announced that George Clements had enjoyed a second cupcake during intermission, to good effect judging from their rendition of “Songbird,” a protest waltz — a genre they may have invented — with close harmonies and haunting lyrics about the mining of the Alberta tar sands.

The Lonely Heartstring Band delivered extraordinary musicianship and a sound that wove bluegrass tradition with contemporary themes. This was the first in the Sylvester Manor series that will bring bluegrass, Celtic and Northern fiddle music to Shelter Island in seven concerts and barn dances throughout 2017.

In a world where fitness is found in eucalyptus-scented warehouses with rows of heart-monitoring, cadence-counting electronic devices and throbbing music you feel in your chest, FIT stands apart. Like all things Island, we do gym a little differently here.

Sure, other fitness centers have interactive stationary bikes equipped with features that reproduce the visual and physical conditions you would encounter if you decided to ride a stage of the Tour de France. But they don’t have the inspiring view from the window by the ellipticals at FIT after 11 a.m. weekdays after Labor Day. That’s when recess takes place; a fascinating hour of Shelter Island’s schoolchildren playing ball, speed-walking around the track and hanging like orangutans from the playground equipment.

San Francisco’s highly-rated CrossFit gym has a shirts-on policy for men and women to keep dripping sweat under control and to ensure theirs is not a place where, says the founder, “a few super-jacked people can show off their six-packs.” Here at FIT no dress code is enforced, with many members preferring long sleeved shirts with cuffs and pants that require ironing. Six-packs are for afterwards.

At fitness centers off-Island, cranked-to-max headphones blare Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift. At FIT on a late December morning, a regular slowly pedaled her stationary bicycle wearing an elaborately stitched Christmas sweater, immersed in a hardback book.

At fancy health clubs in New York and L.A., celebrity stalking is a sport for some and a hazard for the famous. Here at Project FIT, even Town Supervisor Jim Dougherty can be seen exercising in khakis and a driving cap, without interference from the paparazzi.

There are no on-site aerobics or Zumba classes at FIT, and given my history with drop-in group classes, that suits me just fine. I single-handedly injured an entire aerobics class in 1980 when the instructor asked each of us to take turns leading the group in a move. As Donna Summer belted out “Hot Stuff,” I executed a lunge that hyperextended my knee, and the knees of my classmates as they unwisely followed.

A few Saturdays ago at FIT, two kids in their 20s who seemed to know each other from high school reconnected over by the treadmills.

“I’m here visiting my folks for the holidays.”

“Didn’t see you last night, I must have left before you got there.”

“Where are you living?”

“Brooklyn, how about you?”

“Brooklyn, Nice! I’m in Queens, Astoria.”

Meanwhile, on a stationary bike, a self-styled “Codger” revealed the secret exercise motivation coming through his earbuds. “I listen to Donald Trump stump speeches, which activates my muscles and blood in ways no exercise could,” he said. “If Trump stays the course I may be able to fulfill my dream of competing in Senior Mixed Martial Arts.”

Health clubs are a big and profitable business in most places. Project FIT is not big and by intention, just breaks even. It was the invention of Lila Piccozzi and Maura Regan, seniors in the Shelter Island High School Class of 1998, who wanted to leave the fitness facilities at the school in better shape than they found them. The two of them brought the community together around their idea, raised the bar to include a fitness room, tennis courts and ball field improvements, and gathered over $250,000 to make it happen.

Ten years later, someone realized that Project FIT, although operated by the Town, had been constructed without a building permit and opened without a certificate of occupancy. I have to admire a gym that so closely recreates the experience of hanging out in a friend’s garage that it can operate for years without anyone asking if the paperwork is in order. I wouldn’t think of asking if the Health Department inspected the premises before eating dinner at a neighbor’s house. Would you?

There are 34,000 health clubs in the U.S. and 54 million Americans are members. But 437 people — an increase of almost 30 percent in 2015 — belong to the most remarkable little fitness center of all, Shelter Island’s own Project FIT.

From the beginning, Project FIT has been equal parts socializing and exercising. Wondering how the girls basketball team did in their Friday night game? Find out at Project FIT on Saturday morning. Curious about how the Bucks offense will fare against the North Fork Ospreys in a summertime Friday-night Hamptons League face-off? Hear the scouting reports from the (large!) guys when they do their weight training before the game.

FIT aides Katherine Doroski, Janine Mahoney and Katherine Brewer, and Director Garth Griffin know that sometimes the socializing can get pretty intense, “Some stay for fifteen minutes after closing time talking,” said Griffin, “I have to shoo them out.”

Lily Brett is a rock journalist, essayist, author of seven novels with an international reputation and nothing in her background to prepare for life outside a city, let alone on a rural island.

Born in a German displaced persons camp in 1946, her parents were survivors of the Holocaust. When Lily was 2 years old, her family of three — all that remained of a once large and wealthy Polish family — emigrated to Australia.

Her parents found factory work. They didn’t have the means for a vacation, with one exception, Lily recalled. Her father paid a truck driver to transport them to a Jewish guesthouse an hour outside of Melbourne. Lily’s father was tied to the back of the truck while she and her mother rode in the cab with the driver, Lily’s mother yelling out the window to her father to confirm that he was still strapped in.

At the guesthouse, everyone stayed indoors throughout the day with the windows closed and played cards. “I thought this is what you do in the country,” Lily said.

Although she has learned to enjoy going outdoors, on Shelter Island with her husband, artist David Rankin, she’s often working.

Her last three novels were written entirely on Shelter Island, including “Lola Bensky,” based on her own experiences, which won France’s prestigious Prix Médicis Etranger in 2014.

She grew up with her parents and seven other Jewish families in a “terrace house:” eight rooms with one family in each room, one bathroom and one kitchen. She was the first person in the building to learn English and became a valued member of the community even as a young child.

“I thought it was fabulous,” she said. “I felt loved. There is something great about being 4 or 5 and being useful.”

Lily’s parents, particularly her mother, continued to mourn their family — all murdered in the Holocaust. Lily said they taught her that “we were so lucky to live in a country that was free of persecution, that gave us a chance, not at regaining any of the old life, but a chance of living in freedom.”

At 18, she was hired as a writer by Philip Frazer, one of the founders of the first Australian pop-music newspapers, “Go-Set.” It was 1965, rock and roll was taking the world by storm and Lily found herself interviewing superstars such as Jim Morrison, who she described as “cruel and indifferent,” and Jimi Hendrix, “a thoughtful, sensitive human being.” She added, “His hips stayed firmly in place throughout the interview.”

She covered the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, traveled extensively and developed an international reputation as a rock journalist.“I wanted my work to have a serious aspect to it,” she said. “I didn’t want it to be just frothy.”

Still it wasn’t exactly what her parents had in mind. “I was meant to be a doctor or a lawyer,” she said. “My dad said ‘better than Perry Mason.’ He dreamed of me doing good in the world.”

Lily met David Rankin when she was sent to interview David’s wife, Jennifer Rankin, a noted Australian poet who was terminally ill. Lily had been married for 10 years and had two children, Paris and Gypsy, who became friends with David’s daughter Jessica.

Soon Lily realized she had fallen in love. “I had a real gratitude that I found that sort of love,” she said, “And the most interesting person I had ever met.” They married in 1981.

In 1989, Lily and David and their children left Australia for New York. Their first experience of Shelter Island was in 1991, at the invitation of Philip Frazer, who, like them, had moved to New York, and Frazer’s wife, Cydney Pullman who had a home on the Island.

David immediately fell for the landscape, which reminded him of rural Australia. Unlike David, Lily had no experience of life outside the center of a city and wasn’t sure she wanted any. “Trees overwhelm me — too many trees,” she said. “I didn’t grow up with it. I never saw a vegetable growing.”

The first cottage they rented was infested with crickets, but they didn’t stand in the way of her work. “The owners saw me on the day we arrived. And then not until I emerged several months later … I think they thought David had murdered me.” She wrote her acclaimed novel, “Too Many Men,” that summer.

In 1995 when Lily learned she was shortlisted for a literary prize with a large cash award, David proposed a deal. “He said if you win this, let’s buy something on Shelter Island.” Assuming she wouldn’t win, Lily agreed, and forgot about it.

When she got a call from Australia saying she’d won, Lily prepared to renegotiate the deal with David. Too late. “As soon as he finished weeping with happiness,” she said, “I heard him on the phone with Shelter Island real estate broker, Cathie Perrin.”

As described by Lily, their search for Shelter Island property was the stuff of a real estate professional’s nightmares. After Cathie Perrin had driven them all over the Island, David told Lily, “You are not looking properly at things. You are not taking it seriously.”

They pulled up to a vine-choked acre of land on Midway Road near Wades Beach and Lily announced, “This is it.”

“You haven’t even stepped out of the car,” said David.

“I rolled the window down.”

“What’s so special about this place?”

“I feel it’s going to be sheltered from weather. And it’s a place we should be.”

The Island became essential to Lily’s creative productivity. “I don’t know that I could write anywhere else,” she said. “Everyone who knows my work knows Shelter Island. It’s given me another life.”

Her friendship with the late Cheryl Hannabury helped her understand what makes the Island community special, and different from urban life. One day, Lily and Cheryl were talking when they heard an emergency siren. “I said, ‘Oh, another ambulance,’” said Lily, “since it was a familiar sound in the city. But Cheryl said, ‘No, when you hear an ambulance on the Island, it means that one of us is in trouble.’”

Lily’s mother died at 64 of cancer and for years Lily grieved openly. “I think she would have been surprised and quite pleased,” said Lily. “Like most of us, she probably didn’t know how much I cared about her.”

Today, Lily’s father is 99 and living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. “Your age follows you around,” she said. “I hate it when they give the year of your birth and a dash. This is just asking for trouble.”

Her parents’ legacy is to be as good a human being as you can. “It’s all about love,” she said “My parents told me that nothing is valuable except for love.”

LIGHTNING ROUND — LILY BRETT

What do you always have with you? A beautiful silver Star of David a reader gave me at a book event in Germany. I use it for my house keys.

Favorite place on Shelter Island? My study.

Favorite place not on Shelter Island? Caffé Dante on Macdougal Street in New York.

Last time you were afraid? I was born afraid. You cannot grow up with parents who were in a refugee camp and lost all their family and not be afraid.

Best day of the year on Shelter Island? Every day, especially if the electricity hasn’t gone out.

09/01/2015

Tim Purtell in the pollinator garden that surrounds his home in the Heights.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on August 27, 2015

The garden around Tim Purtell’s Shelter Island home is a hopping place. And that’s just the way he likes it.

During the course of a couple of hours spent talking with him about his life, his work on the Green Options Committee and childhood memories of Shelter Island in the 1950s and 1960s, we were interrupted constantly.

First by a juvenile squirrel who repeatedly popped up from behind a nearby dish of water to peer at us, and then lay across the dish with its front legs spread out like a sunbather at poolside.

“We are probably the only people on Shelter Island who feed the squirrels,” Tim said.

The plants Tim chose for this setting made this a “pollinator garden,” a fact impossible to ignore when a hummingbird got intimate with salvia and wasps and bees, too busy to notice us, flew close. A swarm of butterflies, an American goldfinch hanging upside down on a branch and a spunky chipmunk completed the scene.

“That’s the funny thing about this house,” Tim said. “We’re like St. Francis. All the animals know that nothing bad will happen to them here.”

Born in New York City, Tim first came to the Heights when he was four months old, in the summer of 1948 with his parents, brother and sister.

The family rented at first, and then bought the property next door where his parents later lived full-time from 1974 through the late 1980s. In 2001 Tim and his partner, Robin Drake, built their own home on part of that same property.

Tim and Robin have been together since 1977. As for marriage, Tim said, “Robin likes to joke, we don’t want to rush into it.”

They met in an elevator, when both worked in the same New York office building. “Robin is a lively person, very warm,” said Tim. “It turned out I worked with a woman who had gone to recorder camp with Rob and she said, ‘Oh Robin Drake, he’s wonderful.’”

Tim confirmed that Robin is wonderful — both as a flute player and as a person.

Tim developed an early passion for movies and seems to have skipped Bambi in favor of edgier stuff. He said, “Hitchcock’s ‘The Lady Vanishes’ is the first movie I remember, because I was really puzzled by why the nun was wearing high heels.” (Spoiler alert — she isn’t a nun.)

“My mom was such a good sport about it. She’d take me to some of the worst movies,” he recalled. “We had to stand in line to see a Japanese monster movie, ‘Rodan,’ about flying reptiles.” Tim and his mom went to Greenport twice a week on the “movie boat,” a special movie-plus-ferry price that got you there and back in time for the feature films that were shown all summer.

“Being a child here was terrific,” Tim said.

In the days before backyard swimming pools were common, the Heights Beach Club was the place to be. He rode a bike all over the Island without fear. He learned to sail in a kind of catboat called a Woodpussy, with a centerboard and one sail. “A lot of kids had them,” Tim said. “There was a fleet.”

During a circumnavigation of the Island, Tim found himself surrounded by a school of porpoises off Ram Island. “It was idyllic,” he said, “one of the reasons I’m interested in environmental things now.”

There was abundant animal life in the water when Tim grew up, life that is largely gone today. “If I went swimming in June, the blowfish would nibble my toes, there were crabs, skate, horseshoe crabs, sand sharks,” he said. “In the fall the scallops would scratch my legs and wash up on the shore, there would be so many.”

Tim graduated from Bard College in 1971 and then worked in the city at the Time Inc. editorial research library (aka “the morgue”) and as a videographer with dance studios, where he met Heidi Fokine, a dancer in a small group, who later moved to Shelter Island herself.

In 1990 he went to Entertainment Weekly, where he worked for 21 years as a fact-checker, moving up to become head of the department, a writer of DVD reviews, and later editor of a section of the magazine.

He enjoyed the excitement, fast pace and working with “a lot of fun, smart people.” A weekly, EW’s deadline was Tuesdays and Tim would often work until four or five in the morning. “Your adrenaline would kick in,” he said.

He stayed at EW through many changes of management, but eventually “it was no longer fun so I decided to leave.”

In the early 1990s, the Greenport theater was being renovated, when Rob and Tim, moments before boarding a bus for New York discovered the original marquee letters from the 1930s in a dumpster. It would be many years before dumpster diving became a trend “but this was a must-dive,” Tim said.

The letters, which spell, “Vertigo with James Stewart,” are now mounted over the fireplace in their home. “I saw ‘Vertigo’ when I was 10 in 1958,” said Tim. “I’d actually seen it at the Greenport theater.”

In 2011, Tim and Robin left the city and began to live full time in the house in the Heights that Robin had designed for them. A few weeks after leaving the city, Tim was still settling into the pace of Island life. “Rob was teaching a lot in the city and one day I was at the post office hanging out for what I realized was way too long,” he said. “I was desperate to meet people.”

He met Chris Fokine and Herb Stelljes and they suggested he join the town’s Green Options Committee.

Since then, Tim has worked so diligently promoting a green and sustainable Shelter Island that the bees in his garden would be hard-pressed to match his work ethic.

He became the organizer of the Green Expo, a project conceived by Town Attorney Laury Dowd that has become an annual event to educate and inform Islanders about local environmental issues including the control of invasives, the use of pesticides for tick management, the benefits of reusable shopping bags and the development of open public spaces.

Tim has spearheaded a number of the Green Options Committee’s initiatives, including the reusable bag campaign, advocating for a reduction in the use of plastic one-use shopping bags in favor of reusable bags that don’t get tangled in tree limbs or caught in roadside foliage. He has also worked closely with fellow committee members informing the public of walkable open spaces and produced a map of these places.

Vinebusters, an initiative to target overgrown areas of town land and organize volunteers to clear them of invasive vines, is another project that Tim and Dan Fokine organize and execute.

Encouraged by the success of his own pollinator garden, Tim’s working to establish more of these gardens on the Island. “You don’t have to be extreme,” he said. “It’s a matter of planting things that suppress weeds and attract butterflies, hummingbirds and wasps.”

Informing all his work on behalf of the environment of the Island is Tim’s view of this place as unique and exceptional. “We are not the mainland,” he said. “We have our own rules.”

Recently, he put the disc back in disc jockey, taking his prodigious collection of 45 rpm records to the Shelter Island Historical Society, to DJ the dance party.

Maggie Murphy was enjoying the quiet beauty and significant snow cover of a February Shelter Island weekend with her husband David, daughter Maeve, and a nine-month-old Goldendoodle named Ellie, when two visitors broke trail through a foot of ice and snow, tramped into their home and left dripping boots in a mound by the front door.

“Would somebody throw my pants up to me?” Maggie yelled. David wadded up a pair of jeans and fired them upstairs.

Next to Sundance, the Oscars and the White House Christmas party, all of which Maggie has experienced, her Shelter Island life is less red carpet and more Stainmaster.

Maggie’s distinguished publishing career spans decades as reporter, editor and industry leader at Us, Entertainment Weekly, Life, People, Parade and starting last month, theMid.com. She has told the stories of every kind of American, from single moms working at Wal-Mart to Barack and Michelle Obama working at the White House.

Maggie was born into a large Irish family in Queens. Her four siblings still live within a few miles of where they all grew up in Woodside. “My parents were immigrants in the mid 50s, a good time to be Irish in America,” she said. “People knew us in our small neighborhood, knew my mother, knew who my family was.”

Maggie got her start in journalism at a New York City public school, Bryant High. A self-described “good Catholic girl,” when her English teacher asked to see her after class, she assumed she’d done something wrong. He told her she should join the newspaper, “The Bryant Clipper.”

“I was fascinated by the immigrant story I saw on TV,” Maggie said, referring to Rose Ann Scamardella, an Italian-American woman who anchored WABC Eyewitness News in New York City in the late 1970s. “I had a hardscrabble upbringing, my dad was an alcoholic,” Maggie said. “I didn’t want to be around too many sad things. Rose Ann Scamardella looked like she was having fun. I wanted to do that.”

As for college, “There really wasn’t a path in my everyday life,” said Maggie. In her junior year at Bryant, an adviser asked if she was going to college, and when she demurred, answered the question for her. “I was sort of adopted by the English department, they helped me apply, and I ended up getting into NYU,” she said.

Maggie worked at an NYU school newspaper, an alternative weekly. There she met David Browne, who would later become her husband. “He wanted to be a music critic, and I said, ‘Oh wow, you can do that? I’ll try that,’” she said. “We became very focused on how to make our way in the publishing business.”

At first, Maggie and David struggled the way many college grads do. “We had a series of the most unfortunate jobs,” she said.

But every job had something to teach her. At Teen Beat, Maggie learned not to ruin the magazine cover by using the word “flick,” which creates an unfortunate visual impression when viewed in passing. She said, “Years later, when I worked at Entertainment Weekly, this became the Maggie Murphy rule, ‘Don’t put the word flick on the cover.’”

In the late 1980s when clothing retailers were hiring magazine journalists to study color swatches of their apparel and come up with evocative names, Maggie found herself in the middle of the J.Crew and Tweeds “color war.” She went to work for J. Crew after the defection of a team of writers to Tweeds.

“They liked colors like ‘emotion’ for gray,” said Maggie. “At J. Crew, they’d give you a swatch, and you would think, that’s orange, but orange is boring so let’s call it kumquat, or call it ‘team’ for navy blue. It was a wacky, visual job.”

She and David had married and they had a mortgage, so when a magazine job at Us came her way, she took it. Over the next 20 years, she worked in the intense, competitive, and sometimes glamorous world of publishing. She was named “Hottest Editor of the Year” in 2011.

Maggie interviewed Michelle Obama several times and President Obama twice. “They are both impossibly good-looking in person, very tall,” she said. “The president is hard to interview because you get 20 minutes and his answer to every question is 10 minutes long, and you wonder, do I interrupt the leader of the free world?”

In the early 1990s Maggie and David started coming to Shelter Island on weekends when their friend Kathy Heintzelman, who still lives on the Island, invited them to share a house near North Ferry with a tribe of friends, colleagues and competitors from the city.

“My boss at Entertainment Weekly used to call it the ‘Sleeping with the Enemy’ house,” Maggie said. Since then, they’ve continued to live weekends, year-round on the Island, buying their own place in 2000.Maggie and David had Maeve in 2002, when Maggie was close to 40.

She found that having a child deepened her ties to the community, especially the Shelter Island Library. “On Saturday afternoons in the winter, we’d go and read books,” she said. “It’s one of my favorite places, a wonderful institution.”

During her time at Parade, Maggie’s professional life and personal life seemed to come together on Shelter Island. “The thing I cherish most is the way the Island is like so many towns that I visited at Parade — the importance of education, the paper, the library to small town life.”

In the fall of 2014 Maggie was displaced at Parade when the company was sold. “This was the first time in 27 years I’d had to look for a job, something that a lot of people my age have grappled with,” she said. “It makes you reassess where you want to live, how you want to live, what your work life means to you.”

With Maeve’s help, Maggie concluded that work outside the home is vital to her happiness. After leaving Parade, she began to meet Maeve at the school bus, and ask how her day had gone. One day after listening for a while, “the boss in me came roaring back and I said, ‘O.K., here’s how this is going to work. You are going to give me 10 minutes on everything that went wrong and then you are going to tell me how you are going fix it.’”

‘Mommy,’ Maeve said, ‘You need to go back to work.’”

Now working at a startup called theMid.com, Maggie described her job as being the adult in a big room of journalists writing about “the messy middle” of people’s lives: jobs, children, transitions and parents.

She sees some of the changes in her decades here on Shelter Island as improvements. “The glue of the Island is its livability 365 days of the year. I’m mindful of that,” she said. “Stars Café changed the Heights. It’s great to have Black Cat Books and it’s been wonderful to see a Farmers Market and Sylvester Manor. The chicken salad at the Eagle Deli is awesome.”

“To become someone who has a great job, who can have a house on Shelter Island, and be able to live in the city, it is the expression of the American Dream,” she said. “I think it’s so much about teachers tapping you on the shoulder and saying ‘you are good at this, you should do this.’ Ordinary people doing ordinary things make the biggest difference in our lives.”

01/18/2015

COURTESY PHOTO All in the family. The Bankesters in concert. The band, which will perfom Saturday night in the Shelter Island School auditorium, received the Independent Music Award for Best Bluegrass Album in 2014.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on January 15, 2015

A clan of two parents, three daughters, a son-in-law, six dogs, and two cats are set to rock the Island Saturday night.

Meet the Bankesters of Carbondale, Illinois, arriving at the Shelter Island School auditorium with another important number — three Top 20 Bluegrass albums of the year. Daughter Emily won the first International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA) Momentum Award for Vocalist of the Year in 2012, and their latest release, “Love Has Wheels” won the Independent Music Award for Best Bluegrass Album in 2014.

Before they packed the van, Phil Bankester (“Daddy” to his band mates), arranged for daughters Melissa Triplett and Emily Bankester to talk to the Reporter about their family and their music. Phil and Dorene Bankester, and daughters Melissa, Emily and Alysha have been performing for about a decade, but they’ve been singing together since before there was a family.

“My dad sang to my mom when he was trying to get her to fall in love with him,” Melissa said. “It started everything off.”

Eight years apart, Melissa is the oldest at 27, Emily next, and Alysha is 19. “I can’t remember a time when we didn’t sing,” Melissa said, “We grew up hearing harmony, singing together.”

Those harmonies will be on full display Saturday night. In what has become a tradition, 2015 will be the 20th year a bluegrass concert has graced the Island. The moving spirit behind bringing Appalachia east has been Tom Hashagen.

Concerts were held every year beginning in 2004, but with no fixed date or season. It wasn’t until 2007 that the concert found its place on the Saturday of Martin Luther King’s birthday weekend, where it has remained ever since. Garth Griffin, the town’s Recreation Committee coordinator, was helpful in getting the town involved for several years, especially with ticket production and sales, Mr. Hashagen said. And Sylvester Manor has helped recently with getting the word out for one of the great events of the Island’s winter.

Mr. Hashagen will be kicking off the concert Saturday night, fronting the band Large Print Edition, opening for the Bankesters, playing pop songs with emphasis on the American Songbook. Large Print Edition is a “new, old band” said Mr. Hashagen, who will play guitar, along with Dan Skabeikis on fiddle, Doug Broder on bass and Lisa Shaw, vocals and piano.

The Bankester’s first recorded in 2005, a family act with adorable vocalists, the youngest of whom was 9 years old. To grow as a band, they had to “get past the cute family factor,” Melissa said.

In 2007, Melissa met Kyle Triplett at a music festival, and soon the family had a son as well as a banjo.

“Kyle brought true bluegrass into what we were doing,” said daddy Phil. “He’s just a phenomenal banjo player.”

As for the cute family factor, Melissa said, “I think we are past it. We’re not really all that cute anymore.”On that point, there may be dissent.

Melissa and Emily described how they chose material for their new album; a process similar to the way some families decide what to put in the cart at the grocery store. “Each of us girls brings two songs that we’ll be able to sing lead on,” Emily said. “Then we bring it all to the table and everyone gets a say.”

Melissa and Kyle wrote two songs on the new album, “Love Has Wheels.” Melissa said of her song writing, “I like to hear emotion coming across in a song and it’s easier to write that if you are coming from a place of real feeling.”

The inspiration for “Time and Love” came when Melissa was up in the middle of the night comforting the couples’ 19-month-old baby in the wee hours. Unable to fall back to sleep herself, she wrote some beautiful lyrics about holding back time. The next morning, Kyle read them and heard a great bluegrass song.

A local organization in Illinois called This Able Veteran, which pairs service dogs with veterans struggling with physical disabilities such as PTSD, asked the Bankesters to write a song about their organization. Melissa and Kyle responded with the song, “Found.” The chorus of that song, “You’ve taken what was lost and now I’m found,” described the way a good dog can help a veteran negotiate daily life.

Emily and Melissa agree that performing and traveling together has been rewarding. “We have been blessed to actually like our family,” Emily said. “The three of us girls are just best friends. We can be on the road for 10 days and come home and still want to hang out together.”

They’ve heard tell that such harmony does not abide in all families. “That’s what we have been told,” said Emily. “No, we did not know that.”

On Friday, January 16, the Bankesters will conduct a bluegrass workshop at the Shelter Island School for grades 8 through 12. The workshop is made possible by grants obtained by Keith Brace and Jessica Bosak from the Shelter Island Educational Foundation and the International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA.)

10/08/2014

Sara Gordon on the back porch of the Manor House, with a view of Gardiners Creek that has remained unchanged for hundreds of years.

When Sara Gordon, Strategic Director at Sylvester Manor takes her usual walk around the Farm property, her route takes her past the site of an ancient native American settlement on the peninsula that pokes into Gardiner’s Creek. She walks through land that has been continuously farmed since the 17th century, and past a burying ground that holds the remains of 200 servants and laborers who worked and lived here centuries ago.

She never walks alone.

With past, present and future in mind, Sara sees a place where people who are living now, who lived before, and many who are not yet born, seem to coexist. “What makes this place so special is the fact that it has had continuous occupation through all these generations and millennia before that” she said, “and then there’s the vision of sharing this extraordinary place with everyone.”

Sara grew up in Cos Cob, Connecticut at the end of Indian Mill Road, a place named for an old native American corn mill that looked like a giant mortar and pestle. Her childhood home was adjacent to the headwaters of the Mianus River and 500 acres of woods, which she and her sister, Linda explored every day after school while her Mom, principal cellist for the Greenwich Philharmonia, gave music lessons in the house, and her Dad, a marketing executive, worked in the City. Sara said, “I feel a very close connection with Mother Earth and found my way back to a career that would embody that.”

After college at Barnard, and working in New York City in book, video and film post-production and editing, Sara entered a period of struggle. A chronic spinal condition made it impossible for her to work and eventually required surgery.

With her health regained; she moved to the Hudson Valley in 1986, worked as a production editor for a local newspaper, and took time off to raise her son, Sam. It was Sam’s birth that “made me more and more concerned about the state of the planet” she said. “Once I became a parent … I was very concerned about the world that I had brought this child into.”

In 1997, Sara moved to the South Fork with her former husband, and son. Settling in Sag Harbor, Sara got involved in conservation planning and land management at Peconic Land Trust and became a key player in the eventual establishment of the Sylvester Manor Educational Farm.

“My introduction to Shelter Island, was Hoot Sherman. “ she said. Sherman, who was working at the Land Trust, pointed out Sylvester Manor during a tour of the Island, shortly after its owner, Alice Fiske had died. Sara recalls Sherman saying, “This is Sylvester Manor and everybody in town is wondering what is going to happen to this place. “

That moment was a pivot point for her. Sara said, “It was a huge question mark. It could so easily have become a lot of houses and a cash cow.”

Eben Fiske Ostby took possession of Sylvester Manor and in 2008 brought in Peconic Land Trust to help manage conservation of the property with Sara as the project manager.

Sara’s initial connection with Bennett Konesni, Ostby’s nephew, and the person who first envisioned the property as an educational farm, was through music. Sara plays fiddle and sings. “We figured out we were both musicians and started playing music together” she said. “Making music was a big part of Bennett’s starting point. Bennett calls singing ‘erupting in joyful noise.’”

Sara’s other passion is the sea. “I am happiest when I am in the water,” she said “It’s absolute bliss.” Summer through late fall she swims in local waters, and then travels to Bimini when she can, to free-dive with Atlantic spotted dolphins. “I love staying down in the water…I think I was a sea creature in a former life.

In 2009 she joined the Sylvester Manor Board of Directors, and in 2013 became Strategic Director. During these years, she worked to complete the gift, made final on June 23, 2014, that allowed creation of the Sylvester Manor Educational Farm and the preservation of the farmlands, buildings and historical sites. Sara said, “It’s just so fortunate, so lucky. When the Board received the gift of this property this year, there was not a dry eye in the house. It was an incredible moment.”

After hundreds of years of private ownership, the gates of Sylvester Manor have swung open wider and wider. Sara said, “It’s a goal of ours for this to be a welcoming place for everybody. It’s a big change. Those gates were somewhere you didn’t go.” The Manor House is now open most weekends for tours, and the grounds, historical sites and walking paths are open most days.

On Saturday, October 11, Sylvester Manor will hold a daylong event called Plant & Sing; part harvest celebration, part American music festival. The Wainright sisters, Martha Wainwright and Lucy Wainright Roche are featured performers. Sara pointed out that the Wainright sisters are not strangers to Shelter Island, having spent time growing up at the home of their father, Loudon Wainright III. But, like most long-time Islanders, they had little experience of Sylvester Manor until now.

This year’s Plant & Sing will be another great opportunity to get to know Sylvester Manor. Sara said, “ Over 100 volunteers are needed for the event. If you want to attend, but you don’t want to pay, you can volunteer to work for a couple of hours and enjoy the day. “

Sara describes it a collective expression of “ Gratitude, collaboration and celebration. Everyone feels lucky to be able to be on this place.”

In many ways, Sara’s work is a return to her own roots. “I grew up in the woods of Connecticut in a family of musicians who like to cook. So I’ve circled back to where I began. This place is very New England in its feel, and it prioritizes food and music.” We are here to find more ways to erupt in joyful noise.”

Lightning round

What do you always have with you? Song.”I always have music in my head.”

Favorite food? Kale.“I don’t mind local peaches either.”

Favorite book? One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez.“Its stories focus on relationships-community and family…connection.”

Best place other than Shelter Island? In the Atlantic Ocean.“I’m very, very comfortable in water. It takes the weight off. ”

Best place ON Shelter Island? Sylvester Manor.

Favorite person, living or dead, who is not a member of the family? Environmental activist, Joanna Macy.“She is a deep ecologist, who transforms fear into positive energy and action.”

10/01/2014

Bianca Evangelista at the Hay Beach home where she has lived all her life.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on September 18, 2014

On the first day of the new school year here on Shelter Island, Bianca Evangelista was fourteen years, 8 months and 23 days old. A writer, a varsity athlete and a singer, she relates the memories and experiences she has packed into her first decade and a half with confidence and poise. If this Island is an incubator, then Bianca is getting ready to hatch.

Bianca has been a power-user of the Shelter Island Library since she was a toddler. To hear her tell it, the library was one of her favorite places. An early reader, “I used to go to story time with Miss Mollie and at the end I would ask her if I could read the book to the other kids,” she said.

In the 4th grade, Biance was involved in the inaugural 2RsforFun, the Shelter Island Library program conceived by Mary Dwyer that pairs adult mentors with third and fourth grade students. Over her years in the program, Bianca says she has benefitted from great writing mentors, including Mel Mendelssohn, Roger McKeon and Lois B. Morris. “They gave us books to read, but mostly they helped with your writing,” she said. “Sports, animals, family, friends… we made up our own stories. I like to write about cats. I still like to write poetry. At the end of each term they had a publication with a picture of everyone on it.”

The experience paid off for Bianca. She became a published author for the first time when she won first place in a Halloween scary-story competition sponsored by The Independent, an East-End newspaper. She was in 6th grade.

In addition to writing, Bianca loves sports. When she was six, family friend Bob DeStefano, golf pro and Reporter sports columnist, gave her some golf lessons, and she has grown to love the game, which she describes as a sport that requires a stick-to-it attitude for long-term continuous improvement.

“It’s a game that teaches you manners, and how to be honest with the scoring because a good golfer is honest,” she said. “The more you practice, you only get better as long as you form good habits. And you also have to love it.”

Bianca plays on the varsity golf team at school, where she is quite comfortable being the only female on the team. This year, in spite of her gender, she is “third man” meaning the third-strongest player. “I don’t have problems with the boys on the team.” she said, “there is no women’s’ golf.”

She has also participated in basketball and girl’s volleyball, when her golf schedule allowed. In softball, she plays catcher. “When the ball comes, you have to be ready. When the runner slides, you can’t run away,” she said, displaying the grit and determination that define her.

This summer Bianca was an intern at the library, although she admitted some of her friends wondered why. “Everyone asks, why do you work at the library? Some kids think of a library as just books. It’s supposed to be quiet. You can’t talk. But that’s not true at all. It’s not boring. It’s really interesting.”

The total package, Bianca is as accomplished as a musician, as she is a writer and sportsman.

When she was four years old, Bianca discovered karaoke, singing “Love Me Tender” for a gathering of her Dad’s friends. It was her first performance, but hardly the last. She’s a voice student now, and is planning a recital in the fall at a winery in Greenport. She also plays piano, flute and is taking guitar lessons.

Asked if there is there anything she doesn’t do, she responded with a laugh, “I don’t dance.”

Family is central to Bianca’s life. Her sister, Sarah and brother, Chris both graduated from school here. Sarah was valedictorian in 2002 and lives in D.C. where she is getting her MBA. Chris graduated in 2005, distinguished himself in basketball, and Bianca recounted with pride that he scored 1000 points during his high school career. He lives and works in Florida. Her dad, Ray was in the next room, deeply involved in a massive batch of chili, and her mom, Prima, was at work.

Ever-present family members are Butterfly and Morris, two cats who came to her from the Animal Rescue Fund. When a loud crash could be heard in the vicinity of the dining room, Bianca said, “Oh, my gosh, that was my cat.” Butterfly had attempted a leap onto the dining table but landed loudly on the floor. Bianca, calm and unflappable, said, “She’s fine. She does that all the time.”

Bianca can readily identify the thing that makes growing up on Shelter Island special and different for her than any other place. “The way that I feel about my friends,” she said. “We always call each other family. You have all your friends in one place. There is so much love. There are 20 kids in my class, 11 who started with me in kindergarten. Even the kids that came later, we are all very close. That’s why we are different.”

Bianca’s plans for the future are open-ended and inspiring. If she becomes a writer or a musician, she would look to use those gifts to do something big; something productive, something to make the world a better place.

“I want to do something noteworthy,” she said.

Lightning Round- Bianca Evangelista

What do you always have with you? “My phone. Everyone has their phone now.”

06/12/2014

Margaret Garrett and Bruce Wolosoff are artists, their lives on Shelter Island anchored by their love of the physical place as well as the community where their daughters, Juliet and Katya, grew up.

The couple first landed here in 1995 on an excursion from New York City to visit friends who described the place as paradise.

Bruce was a composer and Margaret was a painter. Bruce remembered the first visit: “It was great to establish a relationship with the sky again.”

For a couple of years they came for the summer, but when they realized their work would allow them to live here full time, they made the move.

“You can tell a lot about a community from its post office,” Bruce said. Margaret told of the day Bruce came home from the Heights Post Office in a state of excitement. Accustomed to the sort of post office experiences that gave rise to the phrase “going postal,” Bruce was astonished by the difference on Shelter Island.

“They are so nice,” he said. “They asked me what I was mailing, they helped me package my mail.” That visit turned out to be an early indicator that Shelter Island was the right place for their family.

Bruce has been making music all his life. From a three-year-old at the piano to a rock band as a teenager — “We made a lot of noise” — to an accomplished young pianist playing New York’s classical venues, he had enormous success. Still, he felt unfulfilled playing other peoples’ music and, as he approached his 30th birthday, made the shift from performer to composer.

“I met the right teacher who unlocked it for me. Instead of approaching it with a lot of theoretical materials, he asked me the question, ‘What are you hearing?’ and taught me to trust that inner sound.”

Since then, Bruce has composed for the Columbus Symphony, the 21st Century Consort, the Minnesota Ballet, the Carpe Diem String Quartet, the Eroica Trio and many others.

In 2010, he returned to performing. His latest release, “Darkling I Listen,” is a solo piano performance of 15 short compositions, inspired by the poetry of John Keats. “I would read some of Keats’ poems and a line would jump out at me,” Bruce said. “I would quickly write music to go with it, and then develop the sketches over time.”

He related how a nighttime ride on the South Ferry inspired him to compose a piece for piano and violin called “The Night Ferry.” “I got out of the car. It was a warm night, there was a beautiful moon and a little bit of fog, and I heard this music. It was so clear. I try to respond to my life with sound, and ‘The Night Ferry’ was one example.”

Part of the work was presented at the Music Festival of the Hamptons and at the 2011 Composers of the East End chamber music series in Southampton.

Bruce is now at work on a concerto for cellist Sara Sant’Ambrogio of the Eroica Trio. His process involves visualizing the performer and imagining what she would play. “She’s one of the best cellists I’ve ever heard,” Bruce said. “I picture her … I hear her playing.”

Margaret’s artistic life began with ballet. She began dancing professionally at 16, first with the Pennsylvania Ballet and later with the Cleveland Ballet. She attributed her professional ballet career to growing up in a Pennsylvania town where one of the top ballet teachers in the country happened to live. She finished high school by enrolling in a correspondence course, or as she put it, “an original home-schooler … they mailed you books.”

As she was leaving the Cleveland Ballet to move to New York, a friend told her, “I think you should meet my friend Bruce.”

Eventually, they met for a blind date, in Greenwich Village.

Margaret said, “It was meandery and fun.”

Bruce, “I was sad when it ended.”

They are now approaching their 25th wedding anniversary.

Not long after meeting Bruce, Margaret began to paint. “A friend of Bruce’s was a wonderful painter and he became my teacher,” she said. “He said ’just paint, and I’ll talk to you about them.’ So much is about doing it and figuring it out.”

The paintings in Margaret’s series called “Tuning Fields” are layers of movement and complex patterns, with a calligraphic feel.

Her work is abstract, but influenced by the natural world that she observes. From her Shelter Island studio, she can see the moving sea grass and horizon lines — elements that find expression in her canvases. “Lately, I’ve been watching dance, and then making drawings, finding the form from movement. So I have a group called ‘Lamentations’ based on the Martha Graham dance.”

In 1997, after living on Shelter Island for several years, Margaret and Bruce bought the oldest house in Silver Beach, perched on the margin of sea and sand. Although they were comforted that the house had made it through the 1938 hurricane, Margaret said that the wind “can be very intense.” The seller, who had lived in the house since the 1950s, told them, “you’re going to like it here because sometimes it’s just paradise and other times — well, you’ll see.”

Daughters Katya and Juliet are already both accomplished artists. Still in high school, Katya is a cellist and a visual artist with a summer job on the Island. Juliet is finishing her junior year in college, majoring in philosophy and playing in a band called “Psychobaby.” Margaret said, “We’re hoping they can get a gig on Shelter Island this summer.”

For this family of artists, Shelter Island has been an idyllic home. Bruce said, “People aren’t really here to show off. They are here to live their lives.” To make room to live their lives, after over 20 years raising two girls in the same house where they both work, this past Memorial Day weekend was the time for a big yard sale. Said Margaret, “We needed to clear away a lot of stuff.”

“I feel so lucky, the luckiest person in the world,” Bruce said. “To be able to raise a family here on Shelter Island, and to do music … we are all aware that it’s a special place.”

Margaret’s and Bruce’s websites, with examples of their work and a link to Bruce’s composition, “The Night Ferry,” can be found at margaretgarrett.com and brucewolosoff.com.